Podcasts classical CFO THOUGHT LEADER 755: Serving the Creators | Craig Foster, CFO, Picsart

755: Serving the Creators | Craig Foster, CFO, Picsart

Published: Nov. 28, 2021, 11 p.m.

During 2018, the very year Craig Foster joined Bright Machines, the San Francisco\u2013based company was spun out from contract manufacturing firm Flex, raised a headline-grabbing $179 million in Series A funding, and shed its original moniker, AutoLab AI.

By all accounts, the manufacturing start-up, which promised to use a combination of robots and new software to perform manual labor, was open for business. However, like many start-ups, Bright Machines had yet to add some basic business functions.

\u201cWe had a sense of product, but we didn\u2019t have any infrastructure whatsoever,\u201d comments Foster, who notes that among the company\u2019s most immediate needs was an HR executive hire\u2014someone capable of populating the company with experienced managers.

Still, arguably more critical to future of the business were the remedies for certain flaws that had begun to become visible in the company\u2019s maturing business model.

\u201cI had been working there only a few months before I realized that the business model was simply not going to work,\u201d explains Foster.

\u201cBasically, we had a blueprint for how things were actually supposed to come together but only a semblance of one for what the business model was supposed to look like going forward,\u201d continues Foster, who adds that over a period of months he worked with the CEO and the company\u2019s board to \u201cretool\u201d the model to better facilitate customer recurring revenues and place less emphasis on the services aspect of the company\u2019s offerings.

\u201cWe needed not a reset of the model but just a retooling in terms of how we thought about pricing, product, and development, and we needed to retool these things in concert,\u201d observes Foster, who notes that the new mind-set kept the distinct value that Bright Machines offers its customers in sharper focus. \xa0

Says Foster: \u201cIt was a tough bandage to rip off, but I had great support from the board and everyone else at the time.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0